MEXICO CITY -- A police chief in the border city of Nuevo Laredo goes missing after his brothers turn up dead. Early evening explosions in front of a government building in the capital of Tamaulipas state injure three people. In the state of Durango, the businesses of a mayor's family are burned days after her home is attacked by gunmen. As Mexico's new government continues to fine-tune its public safety plan, distressingly familiar acts of criminality continue unabated, as seen in headlines that have dominated newspapers this week.

In Tijuana, schoolchildren get lessons on how to duck during gangland shootouts. Ciudad Juarez cops patrol with military escorts, and the morgue there is spilling over with gunshot victims. But here in Mexicali, people fear the desert sun more than drug hit men. The city of 700,000 has a homicide rate comparable to that of Wichita, Kan., and one of the biggest police deployments is Operation Beat the Heat, in which officers haul blocks of ice to shantytown residents. There hasn't been a bank robbery in Mexicali in 18 months, or a reported kidnapping in a year.

A Ventura man jailed on child sexual assault charges was found stabbed to death in his cell at La Loma prison in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, authorities said. Federal judicial police say William Lee Heigel's body was discovered early Saturday. Raul Villegas, group leader for the State Judicial Police, said a preliminary inquest indicated that Heigel died of multiple stab wounds to the neck, shoulders, back and chest. Villegas said Heigel was attacked with a machete by a man sharing the cell.

His predecessor was gunned down on his first day on the job. He has three young children and a pregnant wife. But Omar Pimentel on Wednesday pledged to help end a spate of drug-related violence by becoming the police chief of this bloodied border town. After his swearing-in, the 37-year-old Pimentel said he didn't want to dwell on the fate of Alejandro Dominguez Coello, who was assassinated in early June just hours after he took the same oath. But it's clearly on the mind of his employer.

He was notorious for an assassination method known as “ the cookout ” - stuffing his victim into a barrel, dousing him with gasoline and roasting him alive. Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, the Zeta drug cartel commander arrested Monday by the Mexican navy, also burnished his reputation for cruelty with massacres of migrants, 72 in one incident three years ago in Tamaulipas state and 192 more a year later. In his 2011 book “ The Takedown ,” about atrocities committed by drug lords and organized crime captains, author Jeffrey Robinson quotes witnesses as recalling how Treviño enjoyed driving around his Nuevo Laredo turf and deploying his hit men with orders to "kill this one and kill that one. " He once had his driver veer from the roadway to run over a dog, Robinson wrote.

The top cop in this unhinged border city has 300 openings on a 600-member police force, and his fearful greeting gave a big clue why. "Please, please don't use my name or take a photograph," the interim chief begged. One police chief was killed last year, a second quit in the spring, and no one else appears brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to work this side of the law in Nuevo Laredo.

They are known as Los Dos Laredos -- the two Laredos. But Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, are one metropolis -- even if they are divided by a river and an international border. "As goes Nuevo Laredo," said Les Norton, whose family owns three clothing stores here, "so goes Laredo." Laredo cringed this year when the State Department issued an alert warning U.S. citizens of a violent drug war in Mexico. In recent weeks, the city's fears have been realized.

MEXICO CITY - Mexican authorities responding to an anonymous tip discovered about 50 mostly mutilated bodies dumped on the side of a highway between Monterrey and the U.S. border, a region where rival gangs are battling for control over a lucrative drug-trafficking corridor. The bodies of at least 43 men and half a dozen women were found Sunday in plastic garbage bags near the town of Cadereyta Jimenez, the location of a large state-run oil refinery, officials in the state prosecutor's office told The Times.

MEXICO CITY - The Mexican navy announced that it had freed 104 Central American migrants who appear to have been kidnapped by an organized crime group in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. The navy announced Friday's rescue of the hostages in a news release to Mexican news media Sunday. According to reports [link in Spanish], the navy was acting on a tip from residents near a home where the migrants were being held. In all, 91 men and 13 women were freed. Two of them were from El Salvador, and the rest were from Honduras, the reports stated.

MEXICO CITY - The top leader of Mexico's most feared and violent drug-trafficking paramilitary cartel, the Zetas, was captured Monday, Mexican authorities announced, the first significant blow to organized crime in the young government of President Enrique Peña Nieto. Mexican naval special forces seized Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, alias Z-40, before dawn Monday in Nuevo Laredo, a border city across from Laredo, Texas, in the state of Tamaulipas, long a Zeta stronghold, government security spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said.